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Title: Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0-679-76184-5 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 April, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Almost flawless.
Comment: This is an extraordinary book. It is an extremely important companion to Conquest's "The Great Terror", for it sets the table. And what a feast it is. Many of the people reading this will have grown up like I did in a cold war household. In those days, in Canada anyway, I actually had friends who ardently espoused communism. Who extolled Lenin and even Stalin. Who saw the western democracies as weak, rotten to the core and on their last legs. We all knew people like that.
It was the western media, more than anything else that we had to thank for that. It was dominated by leftists, many of them (as hard as this is the believe) actually in the pay of, or beholden to, Russia. Those who weren't were hopelessly and wilfully blind. For me, one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th Century was how so many people came to be so thoroughly duped by a murderous gang of thugs who had hijacked the Russian people and sought to take over the world. How was it possible? Pipes tells this story.
And he pulls no punches. He comes from the Thucydidean school of history. He is absolutely unafraid to pass judgement. The first part of the book covers the Russian Civil war from 1918 - 1920. This strange, complex struggle still has yet to have a book length study devoted to it. But Pipes provides the reader with more than enough.
Like Conquest, Pipes is at pains to point out that there was nothing at all organic about the Russian Revolution. It was more of a coup d'etat, stage managed by a tiny cadre of Bolsheviks who had the army on their side. The workers and the peasants, and this is CRUCIAL for our understanding of what happened, had literally NOTHING to do with it.
Once Lenin and his gang were in control (and I use the term "gang" advisedly because they behaved and operated very like a criminal gang), they turned their attention to the rest of the world. They actually believed that their "revolution" was to be followed by a world revolution - which they would supervise. Pipes chapter entitled "Communism for Export" will have you shaking your head in disbelief.
The Russians knew they couldn't control what was written about them unless they controlled WHO did the writing. They did this by refusing the major press agencies access to Russia until Moscow had approved the journalist. The Sunday Times famously stood up to this bullying for decades. Not the New York Times. They sent a pre-approved journalist by the name of Walter Duranty. Ironically, Duranty was an out spoken anti-Communist. But he quickly realised that if he wrote what the Russians wanted, he would have access to inside information - with that would come influence and fame. Better yet for Duranty, he very early on identified Stalin as Lenin's likely successor (at a time which this was not at ALL obvious). He began to eulogise Stalin. He praised collectivisation, denied the Ukrainian famine - and resorted to lie upon lie upon lie. Such was the credulity of the western public and press that he was rewarded for his infamy with the Pulitzer Prize.
He was not alone. Muggeridge reports that all the correspondents voluntarily took their wire stories to the censors to be censored. John Reed, virtually canonised by the movie Reds (a movie which is in and of itself largely a shocking lie), was nothing more than a fellow-traveller blind to every excess of the Bolsheviks. The portrait of him in these pages will have your blood boiling. Randolph Hearst in a signed editorial in 1918 described Lenin's regime as the "truest democracy in Europe."
The point needs to be made bluntly. All of these journalists and fellow travellers have blood on their hands. Had the world stood up to first Lenin and later Stalin, millions, COUNTLESS millions could have been saved.
I have so little room to extol this book. I can only hope that my enthusiasm will in some way prove infectious and draw you to read it. I have focused on one aspect of this book. There is so much more. For example. Pipes makes persuasive case that Communism, Fascism and National Socialism have common roots. That Russian communism was eerily similar to Tsarism (only the Tsarists were more compassionate!)
Very importantly, Lenin comes in for the thrashing that he has so richly deserved all these long years. This zealot has escaped scrutiny for decades - largely because what came after him was so nightmarish. People for some reason like to think of Lenin as a benign philosopher - idealistic and pure - whose dreams were shattered by the evil that was to follow. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could be farther from the truth. He was a murderer, a mass murderer, just like Stalin. The only difference was one of scale. The fact was that Lenin hated democracy - stamped it out - built a totalitarian dictatorship - and paved the way for one of the greatest monsters of all time. And it is small solace to know that Lenin and his gang of thugs reaped what they sowed. That years later Stalin would literally exterminate them with their own weapons.
Read this Book. It is one of the most important books about the 20th Century you will ever read - and it is filled with lessons that we must take to heart. We CAN learn from history. History teaches us to see patterns - it helps us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Book No Historian Can Be Without
Comment: This is definitely one book that sheds light on the early years of Lenin's regime. This book covers many different aspects of the early regime, from the trials of the civil war to the regime's early attempts to spread communism across the western world. Other aspects included the early education programs of the regime and the government bureaucracy that grew like wildfire. The main time frame of this book is from just after the revolution to about the time of Lenin's death, although many topics extend into the 1930s. One can also pick out the topics that were obvious problems in the early 1920s, yet were still present upon the regime's demise in 1991.
Richard Pipes does an excellent job of providing the reader with a comprehensive view of the early regime - few topics go untouched. More importantly, this book is based on a large amount of factual, documented information, some of which has been made available by the recently opened archives in Russia.
This is one of the most authoritative books I have read about the Soviet Union. In the words of the person who recommended it to me - "You'll understand nothing about the Soviet Union if you haven't read this book."
Rating: 2
Summary: Fatally Flawed
Comment: The second volume of Richard Pipes' history of the Russian Revolution shares many of the flaws as the first volume: a refusal to contemplate much recent scholarship, a correspondingly shallow sociological framework, and a complete lack of sympathy not merely for the Bolsheviks, but for the Russians as a whole. Only when they serve as victims of the Bolsheviks does Pipes profess any sympathy. Pipes devotes a whole chapter to Lenin's vicious persecution of religion. Yet one cannot forget Pipes' own comment in Russia Under the Old Regime that Russian Orthodoxy was the most sycophantic and callous of the Christian churches.
In discussing this book's weaknesses, three come to mind most strongly. The first is Pipes' explanation of the Civil War. According to Pipes although the Bolsheviks had virtually no popularity they were able to maintain control of Russia because they were fortunately centered in the heartlands of Russia's industrial might. With this centre under control they were able to conquer the rest of what would become the Soviet Union, which they did with appalling cruelty. Indeed, Pipes goes on to sneer at the Bolsheviks for taking so long and at Trotsky's skill as a military commander. But this is clearly flawed. After all, Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and no doubt many others had been heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Yet they still managed to triumph and win. The Whites were never able to create their own Yenan. Despite mass poverty, famine and economic collapse within the Red zone, they were never able to create a real war economy in their own areas and appeal to the rest of the country. The simple fact was that the Whites were too autocratic and dictatorial to mobilize the popular support they needed to win. Reading Jon Smele's monograph on the fate of Admiral Kolchak brings out their own cruelty and incompetence. Likewise Geoffrey Swain has lucidly argued that the anti-Bolshevik cause suffered a fatal defeat when the populist SRs were betrayed by the quasi-monarchist whites. I'm also not pleased at Pipes' treatment of atrocities. Pipes of course agrees that they were responsible for most of the pogroms committed against Jews. But one should point out that they could be quite vicious against Gentiles as well. And as one might expect from a Commentary contributor Pipes tries to show Woodrow Wilson as unduly soft-hearted and sympathetic towards the Reds. One should read David Foglesong's book on American intervention to find out what really happened.
Second, as a Polish refugee from the Nazi-Soviet pact, Pipes want to show as much as possible the identity of the two dictatorships, and how Leninism was the key inspiration of later totalitarian regimes. The key flaw in Pipes's approach is his tendentious and partial use of the literature. He relies on conservative scholars like Renzo De Felice, Ernest Nolte and James Gregor to help argue, among other things, that Mussolini was in many ways a socialist. By contrast Adrian Lyttleton's seminal work on the Fascist dictatorship and Denis Mack Smith's portrayal of Mussolini's breathtaking opportunism go by completely unmentioned. In order to emphasize Hitler's radicalism he often cites Herman Rauschning's "memoirs," yet recent scholars find him unreliable and inaccurate. Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler does not cite him at all, and in turn Pipes ignores Kershaw's invaluable The Nazi Dictatorship. Pipes also relies heavily on David Schoenbaum's Hitler's Social Revolution, yet he makes no mention of the many scholars who have heavily qualified Schoenbaum's argument that there was one. Finally, Pipes quotes Domenico Settimbrini's suggestion that if Russia had been neutral in 1914, Lenin would have been as "interventionist" and militarist as Mussolini was in successfully agitating against Italian neutrality. In response one should point out that if Russia had been neutral in 1914, there would not have been a world war and there would have been no war for Lenin to intervene in. Second, if Lenin had supported intervention he would no doubt have been treated by Pipes with much more indulgence.
Finally, I can't help but object to Pipes's counter-revolutionary sententiousness. How else can one explain such fatuous statements that in Marxism, "social antagonism was for the first time accorded moral legitimacy: hatred...was made into a virtue." This incidentally occurs in a chapter where Pipes, while ostentatiously asserting the identity of right and left "extremism," cites against the Jacobins Pierre Gaxotte, anti-semite, member of Action Francaise, and Vichy's official historian of the French Revolution. And really one must object to Pipes quote of Karl Popper on the final page: "Everyone has the right to sacrifice himself for a cause he deems deserving. No one has the right to sacrifice others or to encite others to sacrifice themselves for an ideal." Is it too much to point out that Pipes and Popper cannot believe this? For a start it would forbid conscription, while "encitement" is an inseparable part of democratic debate. And from El Salvador to Palestine to Vietnam there has no been end of sacrifices the men of Commentary and Encounter have demanded from desperately poor and miserable people. Pipes' reputation reflects less on his skill as a historian than on the lock step mentality of conservative journals, and the unwillingness of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books to challenge them. One should really turn instead to Catherine Merridale's recent work on Russian mourning and upcoming work by Lars Lih.
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Title: The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679736603 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 05 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Russia Under the Old Regime by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0140247688 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Communism : A History by Richard Pipes ISBN: 0679640509 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 04 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Three " Whys" of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes ISBN: 067977646X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0195051807 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 1987 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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